User blog:Barbaloot/Blacksmithing Demystified
you can read a condensed version of this on the [[Blacksmith#Why Craft Blacksmith Items|Why Craft Blacksmith Items] page.] Ever been burned crafting something at the Blacksmith? You created a shiny new weapon or warrior and your total attack and defense went down instead of up? Then this article is for you :-) Blacksmith crafting is something of an arcane art, but understanding a few key parameters can help pierce the veil and usher you in to the small circle of initiates who have wickedly high total attack and defense ratings. Let's dive in! First, here's what Kano has to say about the Blacksmith: Blacksmith Visit your Blacksmith to craft new and better items from any unused Gifts and low-level items that might be cluttering up your inventory. Your Blacksmith already has many recipes for new equipment, all you have to do is find the components for them. However some recipes are hidden, and have to be discovered either by trial and error, or by getting another Viking in the know to tip you off. Pro tip: Visit the Community Forums to discuss crafting and recipes with your peers! Sounds simple, right? But what are "unused Gifts and low-level items?" Unused means they don't appear in your Clan Weapon or Clan Warrior lists. They don't count when you attack or defend. If you haven't looked closely at your Total Attack and Total Defense stats recently, let's revisit. From the Viking Clan home page, click PROFILE, then click Battle Strength. We'll begin by expanding Clan Weapon Attack (just click the link). Here you can see all the weapons that actually count for attack and defense purposes. In all likelihood your full inventory includes many more weapons, but these are the ones that you actually use. Scroll down to the very end of the list and make a mental note of the last weapon on the list. You probably have a number of those same weapons. As an example, let's say your last line for Clan Weapon Attack looks like this: 52 Fire Wingsuits 2,080 What we really need to know is the attack value for a single Fire Wingsuit. You can look here on the wiki, or look it up in your clan inventory, or you can divide the total rating by the number of Fire Wingsuits. Let's do the math: 2,080 / 52 = 40 Or you can just hover over the Fire Wingsuit text ;-) Don't get mad, there's a reason I wanted you to know how to do the math instead of always relying on the tooltip. So a single Fire Wingsuit has an attack value of 40. This number has important implications for both Co-op bosses and adventures. For example, why would you attack someone else's Minotaur co-op boss? The best weapon you could possibly gain would be Twin Minotaur Axes also with an attack value of 40, no better than what you already have. You might be attacking it for the xp, or to help a friend or a guildmate, but be very clear: you won't be improving your Clan Weapon Attack rating. A similar reasoning applies to adventure drops - once you've earned an adventure achievement, don't keep doing it if the drop won't increase your Total Attack or Defense ratings. Anyway, I digress - back to Blacksmithing :-) So we've established that we need to be aware of the bottom of our Clan Weapon and Clan Warrior lists, and we need to know the ratings for those weapons and warriors. We can see from the wiki page that the Fire Wingsuit 40/48 is an ingredient in the Hellfire Chariot, a 60 Attack, 60 Defense weapon. We'll also need a Fire Chariot 48/40. The Hellfire Chariot is a hidden Blacksmith recipe, but we can see all the ingredients on the wiki page. We can also see that the ingredients are a bit more involved: *15 Billion gold coins; *50 x Fire Wingsuits; *50 x Fire Chariots No problem, in this example we have 52 Fire Wingsuits, 2 more than we need to craft. Let's assume that we also have the requisite 50 Fire Chariots as well, and we have the cash. So, we have the ingredients, we add them all to the Blacksmith Workbench, and click the big green "Craft Item" button. Hooray! we now have a Hellfire Chariot, which at 60/60 is 20 attack points higher than our 40/48 Fire Wingsuit. Let's head back over to the Battle Strength page and see how we did. Yikes! Our total attack went down '''by 1940 attack points! What happened? Here's why I had you do the math earlier: those 50 x Fire Wingsuits you used to craft the Hellfire Chariot were collectively contributing 2000 (50 x 40) attack points to your '''Clan Weapon Attack rating. So what we in fact did was trade 2000 attack points for 60 attack points. Not so smart. And we lost a lot more defense points in the transaction as well (48 x 50 = 2,400 which we traded for 60 defense points). Remember I said to make a mental note about the bottom weapon in your Clan Weapon Attack list? What if instead of a Fire Wingsuit 40/48 it was a Ledhrblaka Helm 41/48? Well, the good news is we wouldn't have lost the 1940 attack points because those 40 x 50 attack points wouldn't be counting to our Clan Weapon Attack rating. So we'd be up the 60 attack points. Great! Not so fast, because in all likelihood those 48 defense points per Fire Wingsuit were still counting toward your Clan Weapon Defense rating. You'd have taken a much greater Defense '''rating loss. In reality, you're not going to lose 1940 attack points in one go. You probably would have had a 39/xx weapon like a Hellfire Helm that would have started counting again (went back on the '''Clan Weapon Attack list), and those 39 x 50 points (1950, assuming you had 50 Hellfire Helms or equivalent attack weapons) would have offset the 1940 loss: *Fire Wingsuit: 40 x 50 attack points (2000) lost in crafting; *Hellfire Helm: 39 x 50 attack points (1950) go back on the list; *Hellfire Chariot: 1 x 60 attack points gained; *Total attack points gained: 10 If you didn't have 50 weapons with a 39 attack rating, the total attack gain would have been even less. Here's the take-away: make sure that whatever Blacksmith ingredients you use in crafting have already dropped off both your Clan Weapon Attack and Clan Weapon Defense lists. This isn't a hard and fast rule. There are sometimes good reasons for using active weapons and warriors as crafting items. Just be aware that when you do so, you are always losing the points those craft items contribute. 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